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Age of Charlemagne
The '''Age of Charlemagne' lasted from about 768 AD until 843 AD. It began with the reign of Franksih king Charlemagne, the towering figure of early medieval European history. It then ended with the crumbling of his vast empire, culminating in the Treaty of Verdun, a partition of lasting significance, as well as the escalation of Viking expansion. Much of the shape and character of medieval Europe was defined by Charlemagne. He was obviously still a traditional Frankish warrior-king; he conquered a vast realm bigger than anything since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. What was more novel was the seriousness with which he took kingship as responsible for the spiritual health and material well-being of his subjects. He protected the Christian Church, and the papacy in Rome crowned him the first Holy Roman Emperor in gratitude. Wanting to magnify the grandeur and prestige of his court, he beautified its physical setting consciously emulating Roman architecture, and filled it with eminent scholars and evidence of Christian learning. In the process he spurred a period of energetic cultural and intellectual revival known as the Carolingian Renaissance, notable for the preservation of classical works and a modest reawakening of literacy. Many generations of kings throughout medieval Europe would idealise and aspire to emulate Charlemagne, as the Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar of Christendom. He has been called the "Father of Europe", whose reign can be viewed as the emergence true European civilisation, centred no longer on the Mediteranean, but in northern Europe at his capital at Aachen, not far from Brussels the de facto capital of today's European Union. After his death, the Carolingian Empire began to slowly crumble, as the fragility of its political structures were exposed by the intrigues of nobles and depredations of Viking raids. There emerged in its place a partition of lasting significance between the future Germany; one of the great fault-lines of European history. Even then, the authority of the kings was weak, as fief-lords drew more and more power to themselves, resulting in the fragmented society that later historians called the Feudal System; it would dominate Europe for the next 500 years. Charlemagne's achievements should not be overstated. His court was a primitive thing by comparison with Constantinople, even if the Byzantines were enduring a period of religious turmoil known as the Iconoclasm Controversy. In time, a man would emerge to drag the Eastern Roman Empire into one last period of glory, the Emperor Basil I. His cultural achievements to were paltry too when compared with the ''Islamic Golden Age'''' being enjoyed by the Muslim world under the Abbasid Caliphate; an effervescence of culture and learning unlike anything that had been seen since Classical Greece. It is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the fifth Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid (d. 809). One aspect of Abbasid civilization was a great age of translation into Arabic, making available to Arab scholars all the categories of Greek thought, as well as Indian, Persian, and Egyptian works. Having import the "''philosophy of the ancients" into Islamic culture, scholars were able to forge new advances in many fields. Its greatest triumphs were in mathematics, science, medicine, and philosophy; they advanced algebra; popularised "Arabic numerals" which made written calculations far simpler; provided the names for more than more than half the brightest stars in the sky; played a significant role in the history of the Scientific Method; wrote a medical encyclopedia that became the standard textbook of both Islamic and Western training until the mid-17th-century; and popularised and pushed forward Aristotelian rational reasoning. There can be no doubt of Abbasid wealth and prosperity at its height, rivalled at the time only by Tang China. The luxury and delight of Baghdad at this time has been impressed on the Western imagination by one of the most famous works of Arabic literature, the Thousand and One Nights. History Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne (768-814 AD) Charlemagne (768-814), Latin for Charles the Great, was the greatest of the Carolingian Dynasty, and indeed the greatest figure of Western European history since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. His father Pepin, like all Frankish kings, divided his realm at his death between both his sons, Charles and his younger brother Carloman. The brothers had a strained relationship, but Carloman conveniently died three years later, maybe of natural causes, maybe not. Charlemagne certainly disregarded the claims of his brother's heirs, to become the sole ruler of the entire Frankish realm. He proved a king ready to step out of the shadow of the Roman past. It was a role for which he was ideally suited. At about 6'7 feet tall and heavily built, he was an imposing physical presence, and must have towered over most of his entourage. He loved the military life, and was blessed with extraordinary energy, personal courage, and an iron will. Yet he was no less at home at court, generous with his gifts and adept at winning fierce loyalty in others. He received only an elementary education, but possessed considerable natural intellect, a willingness to learn from others, and a zealous belief of Christianity. These facets of his persona combined to make him a leader capable of making informed decisions, willing to act on those decisions, and skilled at persuading others to follow him. Charlemagne was obviously still a traditional Frankish warrior-king; he conquered and his business was war. His most demanding military campaign pitted him against the pagan Saxons of northern Germany, tribesmen whose raids had long plagued the settled Franks from their forest sanctuaries; the Saxon Wars (772-804). Charlemagne waged a brutal war of conquest followed by forced conversion against them, that began with the destruction of their most sacred shrine, the Irminsul, a massive wooden column believed to hold-up the world. Steadfast and resourceful resistance was led by the Saxon chieftain Widukind (d. 807), who destroyed Frankish military encampments whenever their army was occupied elsewhere. Charlemagne would In turn punish the offenders, as he did at the Massacre of Verden (October 782) where 4,500 Saxon prisoners were executed by beheading. Widukind surrendered in 785, and agreed to be baptised, but the decentralised nature of Saxon society meant that it took another 20 years against smaller uprisings before all of Saxony was permanently subjugated. Meanwhile soon after the beginning of his sole rule, Charlemagne answered an appeal from the papacy in Rome for help, against the Lombards who were again encroaching on the Papal State. Like his father, Charlemagne led two victorious expedition into Italy, that ended with the annexation of northern Italy in 774, and a new title for himself, King of the Lombards; Lombard duchies did hold-out in southern Italy until the 11th-century. The conquest of northern Italy left the independent-minded duchy of Bavaria isolated; it was forcibly annexed In 788. That victory brought the Franks face to face with the Avar Khanate (580-804), whose extensive territory spanned both sides of the Danube. Bavaria was used as the staging ground for a series of sporadic campaigns between 790 and 803, that did not conquer the Avars but hastened their disintegration. The plunder from these campaigns would finance the entire Frankish realm for the next twenty years, and perhaps as importantly, it opened the route down the Danube to Constantinople. One of Charlemagne's few military disasters was his first attempt invade Muslim Spain in 778. He was unable to take the city of Saragossa and the Muslims forced him to retreat, during which his rearguard was cut-off and annihilated ironically by Christian Basques. Paradoxically, this failure became the most famous moment in the whole Charlemagne legend, immortalised in the heroic epic poem The Song of Roland. Despite this setback, Charlemagne persisted in his effort to make the frontier more secure from Muslim raids. By 801, subsequent steady campaigning by Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious, had carve-out a small territory south of the Pyrenees around Barcelona. Despite hostility with Muslim Spain which was near enough to be a threat, Charlemagne maintained not unfriendly relations with the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, and was presented with the gift of an elephant by Harun al-Rashid in 801. By the end of his reign, Charlemagne had united most of Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Western Roman Empire; the only empire to ever unite France and Germany, except for a few years under Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. As well as a conqueror, Charlemagne was an able administrator over his vast, ethnically, and culturally diverse realm. He was not an innovator, but made the political institutions inherited from his predecessors more effective. The central force of the kingdom remained the king himself, who when not on campaign based himself in his capital at Aachen, in modern day Germany near the Belgium and Holland borders. It was ideally positioned between east and west of the kingdom, and held particular appeal for the energetic king due to its therapeutic warm springs. Surrounding the king was his court, consisting of family members and trusted lay and ecclesiastical advisors, who would undertake missions across the realm to convey the king's desires, correct abuses, and rendering justice; the forefather of circuit court judges. To exercise his authority locally, Charlemagne continued to rely on the landed aristocratic families, with the kingdom subdivided into fairly autonomous territorial entities ruled by dukes and counts. Bishops and Abbots also continued to play an important role in local government. The challenge of this whole system was how to guarantee the continued loyalty of local administrators. Charlemagne made very effective use of the traditional Frankish annual assembly, in order to cement the king’s personal ties with them; an early forefather of parliament. The most innovative change of Charlemagne's reign was that kingship more clearly took on the responsibility for the material well-being and spiritual health of his subjects. He took seriously the Christian sanctification of this role, donating money and land to the Church, and protecting the papacy in Rome. In 799, Pope Leo III (d. 816) was again in need of his help, this time against a faction of the Roman nobility who accused him of tyranny and personal misconduct. But who was qualified to judge the "Vicar of Christ"? The only possible answer was Charlemagne, who travelled to Rome and pronounced Leo innocent of the charges brought against him. In gratitude, on Christmas Day 800 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Pope Leo dramatically crowned him "Emperor of the Romans"; the first emperor of what would one day be known as the Holy Roman Empire. After nearly 400 years, an emperor had returned to the West. Historians have been arguing almost ever since about what Charlemagne’s coronation actually meant. To Charlemagne, it seems to have demonstrated his parity with the emperor in Constantinople, whom everybody acknowledged even if he was accused of falling into heresy in the midst of the Iconoclasm Controversy. He is reported to have said that he would not have entered St Peter’s had he known what the Pope intended to do. He may have foreseen the irritation the coronation would cause to the Byzantines. He may have disliked the Pope’s implied arrogation of authority; Constantine the Great had not needed to be crowned by a Pope. By placing the imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head, Leo was carefully emphasising that the imperial crown was for the Church to grant; what it could make, it could also unmake. Charlemagne and his successors were expected to be generous and even subservient to their spiritual betters; the basis of the protracted struggle between Church and Sate that would shape Western Europe for centuries. As an evocation of this, almost exactly a thousand years later, when Napoleon Bonaparte had himself crowned emperor in 1804 by Pope Pius VII (d. 1823), he would deliberately seized the crown and place it on his own head. Charlemagne took his duties seriously too in patronising learning and art, thus spurring the so-called Carolingian Renaissance (780-875). He wanted to magnify the grandeur and prestige of his court by beautifying its physical setting and filling it with evidence of Christian learning. There was of course much to be done. The ebbing of economic life and of literacy meant that a Carolingian court was a primitive thing by comparison with Byzantium. In 805, Pope Leo III travelled to Aachen to consecrate Charlemagne's small but richly decorated new church in Aachen, the Palatine Chapel. It was a conscious and confident attempt to emulate Roman architecture, modeled on San Vitale in Ravenna. The royal example was quickly imitated throughout the kingdom; some 27 cathedral churches were built in the next 50 years. But it was its scholars and scribes who made Charlemagne’s court most spectacular. Learned men in touch with the classical tradition were brought to the palace from throughout the Frankish realm and beyond: Theodulf of Orléans (d. 821) was probably of Visigothic descent; Paul the Deacon (d. 799) was probably a Lombard; John Scotus Eriugena (d. 877), an Irishman; and among them the outstanding figure was Alcuin of York (d. 804), an Anglo-Saxon. Its primary purpose was the revival of knowledge deemed essential for royal administrators, as well as to raise the level of the Frankish clergy in order to carry the faith further to the east; to revive rhetoric and logical argument, history and poetry, to argue against theological heresy particularly Iconoclasm, but above all simply to revive Latin literacy. Achieving this required the expansion of the educational system and the production of books. The copying of manuscripts was carried out in a new standardised script called Carolingian minuscule, which was faster to write and more legible. It later became a basis for modern European printed typefaces with a mix of capitals and lower-case letters. Monastic libraries now began to be assembled throughout the Frankish lands; one example is the monastery of Reichenau, which had some 50 books the year Charlemagne was crowned, but over a thousand just fifty years later. Many of the works of classical antiquity were copied and preserved by Carolingian scholars, especially non-scholarly texts such as Caesar, Horace, and Cicero which were of little interest to the Muslims. Charlemagne encouraged young Frankish nobles at court to be well-educated, and even studied himself. One scholar, Einhard (d. 840), wrote a biography of the emperor after his death, from which we learn such fascinating human details as the fact that he hated his doctors who advised him to cut-down on roasted meat, and of his attempts to read and write but, "his effort came too late in life and achieved little success." In January 814, Charlemagne fell ill with a fever and died a week later at the age of 72. Modern historians have made apparent that in his final years, there were already signs that his vast empire was beginning to disintegrate, with frequent reports of usurpation of royal authority by the landed aristocracy. Neither should his cultural achievements should be overstated: Its greatest legacy was the preservation of learning for later times, and it was primitive when compared with the Muslim and Byzantine worlds. Such critical attention of Charlemagne’s reign however cannot efface his enormous legacy. Poets and minstrels would be singing of his heroics for centuries, and European kings aspired to emulate him for generations; he was the Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar of Christendom. His feats as a knight, both real and imagined, served as the ideals of chivalry. Even outside his own realm in England, the foremost warriors of Charlemagne's court would be incorporated into Arthurian legend as the Knights of the Round Table. Charlemagne did much to define the shape and character of medieval Europe; he has been called "Father of Europe". The basis of cultural gravity in this new Europe had shifted away from the Mediterranean of the classical world, and further to the north centred in Aachen, not too far from Brussels the de facto capital of today's European Union. Islam helped to throw back the West upon this heartland of a future Europe, capturing the islands of the Mediterranean - Crete in 825, Sicily from 827 - and using them as a bases to raid all along the southern Mediterranean coast. Frankish Carolingian Inheritance and Feudalism (814-840 AD) After Charlemagne's death, the Carolingian Empire began to slowly decay. The empire was too large, given the fragility of political structures, and ramshackled nature of communications; we are still dealing with a primitive German monarchy that could only be presided over by someone with Charlemagne's instinctive charisma of leadership. Charlemagne thought in traditional Frankish terms of his territorial legacy. He made plans to divide his vast realm and only the accident of sons dying before him ensured that the empire passed undivided to the youngest, Louis I (814-840); partition was only delayed by this. While Louis is often compared unfavourably to his father, he was quite an effective ruler and military leader; he was much better educated than Charlemagne, and had conquered Barcelona for his father in 801. The troubles of his well-meaning reign stemmed from his three sons who began squabbling over their inheritance even while their father was alive. A nephew called Bernard (d. 818) had been made duke of northern Italy, and he feared being cut-out of the succession, thus began plotting to declare independence. Louis responded to this quickly and decisively. Bernard was tried for treason and condemned to blinding in Byzantine tradition; he did not survive the ordeal however, dying after two days in agony. Even more than his father, Louis believed that his rule was a sacred trust sanctified by the Christian Church; he was known as Louis the Pious. In 822, he performed a public penance to ask forgiveness for his nephews death. But this act of contrition only made him look weak, and his sons jockeying for power intensified. In 832, the brothers allied and forced their father to abdicate; his sons soon turned to fighting each other, and Louis was restored to the throne. During the rest of his reign, order was largely restored to his empire, but his death in 840 was followed by three years of open civil war over the succession. The bloody civil war ended in the Treaty of Verdun (843), a partition of the empire among the three grandsons of Charlemagne that was of lasting significance. The western part was given to Charles the Bald (d. 877), which we can now call the future France. The eastern part went to Louis the German (d. 876), the future Germany. The eldest son, Lothair I (d. 855), received the middle part, a richest strip of territory stretching from Holland down both sides of the Rhine through Switzerland to Italy. He also got the prestige of the imperial title and the former capital of Aachen. This settlement was not long untroubled, but it was decisive in a broad and important way; it effectively created one of the great fault-lines of Europe between France and Germany. Between them lay a third unit with much less linguistic, ethnic, geographical, and economic unity. When Lothair died in 855, his unstable realm was divided among his three sons. His eldest son then died in 869, Fance and Germany both seized parts of it leaving Lothair's younger son only with northern Italy. Much future European history was going to be about the way in which it could be divided between neighbours bound to covet it, and therefore likely to grow apart from one another in rivalry; the Rhinelands, the Low Countries, Burgundy and northern Italy frequently changed hands or allegiance, as power grew or decreased to the west or the east. This rivalry continued all the way down to the 20th century, and still resonates today. Belgium is still bitterly divided between French-speakers and Germanic Flemish-speakers, while Switzerland has no fewer than four official languages and often uses the Latin or English version of the county's name, rather than favour any of them. No royal house could guarantee a continuous flow of able kings, nor could they resist the intrigues of their nobles or the depredations of Viking or Magyar raiders. Gradually, the Carolingian kings declined in power, though they long retained something like the prestige that the Merovingians had in their decline - in their veins flowed the blood of Charlemagne - and would continue as kings in France until 987, while in Germany the family ends in 911. But the reality of both France and Germany was of local nobles drawing more and more power to themselves, no longer appointed dukes and counts, but hereditary dynasties paying little more than nominal allegiance to their king. Thus we have a fragmented society in which the power of the ruler had dissolved into what later historians called the Feudal System; it would dominate Europe for the next 500 years. At its heart were the fief-lords, an aristocracy based on skill in battle and a shared commitment to Christianity; at once power-hungry and idealistic. Since the earliest post-Roman times, kings had given out large estate to them, to yield the income with which to provide fighting men for his armies, an act of generosity that in return required an oath of loyalty and homage. Thus there developed the relationship between lord and vassal. A lord in turn granted to his retainers or knights their own portions of the land and an appropriate number of peasants to underwrite the expenses of military life. Records suggest that the work of twenty or thirty peasant families was required to support one knight. At first, land grants hand been temporary, then given for a lifetime, but by the 10th century they had almost always become hereditary, based on primogeniture. In some places there were great regional lords who had cultivating vassal relationships of mutual dependence with other lesser nobility; examples include the counts or barons of Brittany, Flanders, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Bavaria, Saxony, and Swabia. A pyramid of reciprocal legal and military benefits and the obligations were thus created, in which each man, except at the very top and bottom, was a vassal to one lord and a lord to several vassals. For centuries, great accumulations of power and landed-wealth passed between a few favoured players as if in a vast board game. Bishops of cities and abbots of monasteries had their place in this feudal nobility, for they were great landlords too and mostly recruited from the noble families. Indeed bishops could often be found on the battlefield well into the 12th-century, fighting it out with the best. The papacy in Rome meanwhile had more feudal vassals than any secular ruler in Europe by the late-12th-century. There was much room for complexity and ambiguity in the feudal order: a king might have less control over his own vassals than they over theirs; there were always some freeholders who owned their lands outright; and much of Italy, Spain, and southern France did not work out this way. This was also the beginning of the great age of castle building, as lords entrenched their power in stone, or more accurately "entrenched their power in wood". In the 10th-century these castles were often surprisingly flimsy affairs called motte-and-bailey castles; a wooden keep situated on a raised earthwork and surrounded by a ditch filled with water. It was only during the 12th-century that magnificently impressive stone examples become more common in Europe, influenced no doubt by exposure to Byzantine architecture seen by the Crusaders on their way east, as well as Muslim architecture in Spain. From the 11th-century onwards, stone was the primary building material for Christian castles in Spain, while timber still dominated in northern Europe This was an exploitative and violent society. Even in normal circumstances the lord of the manor may terrorise his peasants into submission. In unruly times, the peasantry were less likely to assert themselves, for they needed the protection of his knights from marauding enemies. But a local lord was reasonably likely to care for his farms and his villages, as they provided him with sustenance and a cooperative labour-force was more productive than a resentful one. Whenever feudal relationships broke-down, disputes were invariably resolved through naked force in battle. Another excellent excuse for warfare was a dynastic claim to a territory, as generations of carefully arranged marriages and material gains resulted in an immensely complex web of relationships. Of the military skills, that which was most esteemed was that of fighting in armour on horseback. It gradually evolved from incorporating many of the pre-existing Roman tactics; early Frankish armies fought with heavy infantry in the centre in a shield-wall and cavalry on the wings. A larger numbers of warriors took to horses with Charlemagne's wide-ranging campaigns of conquest, a trend further spurred by the need for highly mobile force to responded to hit-and-run tactics of Viking and Magyar raiders. At some point in the early-8th-century the stirrup had been adopted; acquired perhaps from the Muslims or Turkic Avars. The Franks also develop exceptionally heavy horses, ancestors of the carthorse. The medieval knight was thus ready to take the field. A mounted knight, protected first by chain-mail and then plate-mail by the 13th-century, would drive home his lethal lance with the full forward impetus of his powerful horse. This method of warfare further reinforced the Feudal System and the social status of the warrior noble class, since it took years of training and a great deal of money to be a knight, not least for his armour and horse. With a knight's face concealed inside armour, devices on helmet and shield were essential to identify friend from foe, thus the "Coat of Arms" was born as a glorious way of advertising one's lineage; a distinguishing mark of European aristocracies. Knights and the ideals of chivalry would feature large in medieval and Renaissance literary romance. We need not take these tales of chivalric heroes devoted to their ladies too seriously. For the most part, these were rough brutes for whom violence was simply an accepted part of life; in any other part of the world historians would called them warlords. The mounted knight would hold sway in the medieval European battlefield until new weapons in the 14th-century, such as the pike and the longbow, restored some measure of advantage to the humble infantry. The Feudal System legitimised rampant inequality in early medieval society, with kings and great nobles the only men who enjoyed much freedom. It nevertheless brought a measure of local order and security when far-off kings or senior lords could not, and thus a total collapse of society was prevented. Feudalism would gradually decline in the Late Middle Ages, as the military power shifted from noble fighting-men to professional armies, and the Black Death loosened the hold of the nobility on common men. Feudal customs and rights nevertheless remained enshrined in the law of many realms until finally abolished during the turmultuous period between the French Revolution of 1789, and the Emancipation of the Russian Serfs in 1861. Byzantines and the Iconoclasm Controversy In 620, the empire had still been recognisable as the Eastern Roman Empire, dominating the Mediterranean and harbouring a prosperous population. Barely a century later, this world had been shattered by the Arab conquests in the east and influx of Slav and Bulgar peoples in the west, resulting in the loss of two-thirds of its territory and a financial system that came close to collapse. The speed and magnitude of this disaster was close to incomprehensible to Constantinople. In the Byzantine world, the line between lay and ecclesiastical was always blurred, so troubled times were as much a religious catastrophe as a military one; a sign of very serious divine displeasure. One natural response was to shore-up Orthodox Christianity. Having only just saved the empire against the Muslim Siege of Constantinople (717-18), Emperor Leo III (717-741) turned around and unleashed a religious firestorm that would embittered feelings and hold-back recovery for over a century; the Iconoclasm Controversy (726-842). At issue was whether religious images were idolatry; "Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image", Leviticus 26:1. Unlike the other major world religions, Christianity had never really made up its mind on this question; generally speaking Judaism and Islam forbade images of God, while Buddhism and Hinduism encouraged them. By the 5th-century, holy relics, items associated with Christ or saints and martyrs, had become prominent throughout Christendom. Pilgrims flocked to numerous religious sites throughout Europe: Rome was obviously a major destination possessing the tombs of the apostles Peter and Paul; Constantinople acquired the remains of the apostle Luke as well as Saints Timothy and Andrew; Tours was very popular in the Frankish Realm, housing the bones of St. Martin; as was Santiago de Compostela in Spain which reputedly possessed the relics of the apostle James, although how they got there from Jerusalem where he died remains somewhat unclear. From there, it was only a short step from the veneration of relics to the veneration of holy images or icons of God Himself or the saints. During the dark days of the Roman-Persian War and Muslim onslaught, icons had become something of a cult for the Byzantines, paraded around the walls in times of war and prayed to in times of peace. There is some mysterious about the reason why Leo III came down on the side of those who claimed icons were idolatry, and issued his decree banning them in public worship in 726. We can only speculate on whether he was influence by the Muslim world where there was an extremely strict prohibition on all images. So began over a century during which the Eastern Church was torn between the Iconodule faction who favoured icons, and Iconoclasts who wanted their destruction or expunging. As the iconoclastic movement intensified, citizens rioted as the imperial authorities set to work with a will destroying beloved icons with whitewash, brush and hammer. Persecution of those who resisted became fiercer, and there were martyrs particularly among monks, who usually defended icons more vigorously than did the clergy. The Controversy was particularly disruptive to the army, since common soldiers predominantly favoured icons, and purges became commonplace. As Byzantine power waned in the chaos, one of their holdings in Italy seized the opportunity for independence. In 726 the people of Venice elected a local leader or Doge (duke) in the Venetian dialect, the first of 118 Venetian Doges that would lead the city for more than 1000 years. Thus the Venetian Republic (726-1796) was born, both an occasional ally and inveterate enemy of the Byzantines. The turmoil also explains the decision of the papacy in Rome to increasingly align the Western Church with the Franks from 751, rather than with Constantinople. The Iconoclasm Controversy reached its peak under the Empress Irene (775-803), an almost unprecedented example of a female ruler in the Early Middle Ages; no one could ever describe Irene as lacking the ambition or ruthlessness of a man. She first came to power when her husband, Leo IV (775-780), fell ill with the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him, and then leapt at the chance to act as regent for her young son. Right from the start, she took more power for herself than was traditionally expected of female regents; her coins depict both herself and her son, listing them as co-rulers rather than as ruler and regent. After a half-century of Iconoclast emperors, Irene was determined to restore the veneration of icons, prompting the army, thoroughly iconoclasts by this stage, to mutiny. The revolt was quickly suppressed, and Irene took the opportunity to carry out a drastic purge that the legions could ill-afford. As morale plummeted, Byzantine Sicily was slowly lost to the Muslims, and the empress was forced to pay Baghdad a humiliating annual tribute to prevent Muslim raids into Anatolia. Undeterred, Irene gathered more than 300 bishops for the Second Council at Nicaea (787), which formally revived the veneration of icons; as it turned out the last ecumenical council to bring together the Eastern and Western Churches. As her son reached maturity, having tasted power, Irene had no intent of releasing it. There were several attempted revolts to proclaim him as sole ruler, that culminated in 797 with Irene ordering her son's eyes gouged-out so brutally that he died a few days later. Despite one of the most notorious murders in Byzantine history, Irene continued to cling to power for another five miserable years, spending lavishly to shore up her support. The end was prompted not from within the Empire, but from the West. The news that Charlemagne had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 was received in Constantinople with utter horror and outrage. To the Byzantines, the only thing worse than an illiterate barbarian calling himself emperor, was the rumour that he and Irene were considering marriage. Constantinople rioted, deposed Irene, and forced her into exile on the island of Lesbos, where she died a year later. With Irene's death, the Iconoclasm Controversy had flared up again, and smouldered on for another 40 years, until it finally expired during the minority of young Michael III (840-867), when his mother Theodora restored the veneration of icons in so diplomatic a fashion that the old factionalisms dissipated. The veneration of icons has been an essential element of Eastern Orthodox Christianity ever since. In their churches today, an icon-covered wall or portable-screen known as an Iconostasis separates the nave from the sanctuary. Irene's reign had been disastrous for the empire, but the series of weak and ineffectual emperors who followed her only hastened the decline. By the mid-9th-century, the Byzantine Empire seemed to be on its knees. But like Scipio Africanus after Cannae (216 BC), Aurelian during the crisis of the 3rd-century, and Theodosius after Adrianople (378), a man would emerged to drag the Eastern Roman Empire into one last period of glory; the Emperor Basil I (867-886). Muslim Golden Age The explosive first century of Arab conquest was only the beginning of the story of the impact of Islam on the world, for great traditions of Muslim civilization were to be built on its conquests and conversions. The contrast to the Germanic experience are startling. Institutionally, the Arabs left the societies they conquered and ruled largely undisturbed, with former Byzantine and Sassanid arrangements continuing to operate. This was at least in part due to the attitude of the conquerors, who were so confident in themselves and their religion, that they didn't feel threatened to new ideas from Roman and Persian civilisation. In turn, the conquered peoples largely welcomed Muslim rule; indeed one fanatical group of Christians were so upset at the contented attitude of their fellow Christians, that they martyred themselves in the marketplace in Cordoba in about 850. Meanwhile, Arab armies were not settle on the land as happened in the West, but a standing professional army, paid directly from the sophisticated system of taxation which survived. In the early Rashidun Caliphate (632–661), the Arabs were segregated from the native population and lived as a military elite in special towns, but this could not be kept up. Segregation was eroded by garrison life, and during the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750) their camps gradually changed into new, cosmopolitan cities such as Basra or Kufa. While the Germanic peoples mostly adopted Latin based languages, the Arabs were never absorbed by the populations they conquered and ruled; indeed Arabic gradually took-over as the language of government. Arab conquest seems to have been followed by commercial and population decline only in a few areas, notably north-western Persia were the complex irrigation system collapsed. Trade nevertheless quickly revived under the Arab peace; Muhammad himself had been a merchant, and the elites of early Islam all came from a similar background. Together with the standard coinage, bearing Arabic inscriptions rather than faces, it was the major evidence of the Umayyad Dynasty's success in laying the foundations of a new, eclectic civilization. Meanwhile, the conquered peoples were not antagonised by having to accept Islam, and the Muslim world would be remarkable for its tolerance of religious and ethnic minorities. Many nevertheless did choose to embrace Islam, some no doubt convinced by the stunning successes of her armies, and others by the lower taxes conversion granted. In Umayyad times, they took their places in a strict hierarchy presided over by the Arab Muslims. Below them came the Muslim converts of their subject peoples, then the Dhimmi (protected persons) as the Jewish and Christian monotheists were called. Lowest down the scale came unconverted adherents of other faiths. Although Islam steadily spread throughout the Islamic Empire, it was still a minority religion until about the 10th-century. By the early 8th-century, when Muslim expansion was reaching something approaching its natural limits, increasing social tensions heralded the breakdown of Umayyad authority. One source of their troubles were grievances among the non-Arab converts to Islam, who felt the egalitarian brotherhood of Islam had been betrayed by Arab supremacy. Many of these neo-Muslims were the local elites who maintained the day-to-day administration, especially in the eastern half of the empire; whereas the aristocracy of the former Byzantine territories largely emigrated to Constantinople, the elites of Persia had nowhere to go, thus remained, irritated by their subordination to the Arabs. These non-Arab Muslim eventually became soldiers too, who resented being treated as second-class, particularly when it came to sharing out plunder. Nor did it help that the later Umayyad Caliphs were men of poor quality, who did not command the respect won by the great men of the dynasty. Civilisation softened them. When they sought to relieve the tedium of life in the provinces they governed, they moved out into the desert, not to live the life of the Bedouin again, but to enjoy their remote and luxurious palaces, equipped with hot baths and great hunting enclosures. The beginning of the end for the Umayyads came with a revolt in Iraq under Abu-al-Abbas (d. 754), a man of impeccable pedigree; he was a descendant of an uncle of Muhammad. He appealed to a wide spectrum of opposition, among whom the Shi’a branch of Islam were especially notable; a schism that dated back to the immediate successors of the Prophet. The fate of the Umayyads was sealed by a decisively defeated at the Battle of the Zab (January 750), after which the last Umayyad Caliph fled to Egypt where he was at last killed in a short battle. With this began nearly five centuries during which the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) ruled the Muslim world, the first two of them the most glorious. The centre of gravity of the Muslim world now moved east, from Syria to Mesopotamia where the city of Baghdad was founded in 762, about 30 miles upstream from Ctesiphon, the ancient Sassanid capital. The change had many implications. Hellenistic and Mediterranean influences were weakened, and this was reflected in the distinctly Persian style of the Caliphate; both politically and culturally. The machinery of government became more elaborate, adopting the bureaucratic system of Persian tradition with the land taxes raising a big revenue to maintain a magnificent monarchy; in sharp contract with the Feudalism of Western Europe. There was a change in the ruling elite too. They were almost always Muslim but they were often converts or descendants of converts. Historians mark the founding of the Abbasid Caliphate''' 'as the end of the Arab Empire and beginning of a more inclusive, multi-ethnic Islamic Empire. The new cultural atmosphere was reflected in the cosmopolitanism of Baghdad, which quickly grew into a huge city rivalling Constantinople, with perhaps a million inhabitants. The Abbasid Caliphs nevertheless did not break with the past ideologically, confirming the Sunnite orthodoxy of their predecessors and persecuting nonconformists; thus leaving the Shi’a who had helped to bring them to power feeling disillusioned and betrayed. There can be no doubt of Abbasid wealth and prosperity at its height, rivalled at the time only by Tang China. They rested not only on its large area where agriculture was untroubled during the Arab peace, but also upon the favourable conditions for trade. A wider range of commodities circulated the Islamic world, and city-life prospered particularly along the caravan routes that passed from east to west. The luxury and delight of Baghdad from the late 8th-century has been impressed on the Western imagination by one of the most famous works of Arabic literature, the ''Thousand and One Nights. The Abbasid Caliphate was also cradled for the 'Islamic Golden Age '(786-1258), an effervescence of culture and learning unlike anything that had been seen since Classical Greece. The Islamic world provided a political organisation that mingled both Roman and Persia traditions, where Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians could play a full role in the community; far more so than Muslims and Jews could within the Christendom. They also brought a new openness to foreigners and their ideas, especially from India, but to a lessor extent from China as well. The Islamic world had one of the highest literacy rates among pre-modern societies, alongside Tang China after the introduction of manual printing from the 10th-century; far higher than in Europe for centuries. One factor was the importance of memorisation of the Qur’an. Another was the diffusion of paper-making from China, which led to a thriving book culture; assembly-line methods were devised to hand-copy manuscripts on a large scale. There was a flourishing parent-driven educational marketplace, and state subsidised schools would be introduced in the 10th-century. The Islamic Golden Age is traditionally understood to have begun under the fifth and best-known of the Abbasid Caliphs, Harun al-Rashid (786-809). He inaugurated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars from various parts of the Islamic world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather. By the mid-9th-century, it was beyond question the largest library in the world. The international renown of Huran himself can be judged by the lengths to which the biographers of Charlemagne went to emphasise the mutual esteem of these two contemporary rulers. One aspect of Abbasid civilization was a great age of translation into Arabic, which replaced Greek as the lingua franca of culture and learning. Christian and Jewish scholars made available to Arab readers all categories of Greek thought, from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, to the mathematics of Euclid, from the medical studies of Galen, to the geography of Ptolemy. A good example of the commitment of the Abbasid rulers to the expansion of knowledge is that henceforth treaties with Constantinople often included clauses to borrow classical works. Many classic Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Egyptian works were also translated, that might otherwise have been lost. Having import the "philosophy of the ancients" into Islamic culture, scholars were able to forge new advances in many fields. Although Muslim history and legal work were both very impressive, its greatest triumphs were in mathematics, science, medicine, and philosophy. The greatest of Islamic mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi (b. 780), pushed forward algebra more than any other man since Diophantus (b. 201); indeed the word "algebra" comes from the title of his most famous work, and his name gives us to the word "algorithm". Another mathematician, Al-Kindi (b. 801) played an important role in popularising "Arabic numerals" (strictly speaking they were Indian in origin), which made possible written calculations with far greater simplicity than did Roman numeration. Islamic science had practical purposes as well as the goal of understanding. Astronomy was useful for determining the direction that should be faced when praying; more than half the brightest stars in the sky have Arabic names. Botany had practical application in agriculture, and the evidence is clear of significant improvements in horticulture, animal husbandry, and irrigation, which in turn supported population growth and urbanisation. Geography enabled more accurate map-making, which reached its apex with Muhammad al-Idrisi (b. 1100), who wrote the Book of Roger, a world geography summing-up medieval Arab achievement. Perhaps the greatest Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham (b. 965) has been described as the "world's first true scientist", for his significant role in the history of the Scientific Method, particularly in his approach to systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation; five centuries before the European Scientific Revolution. He also made significant contributions to the principles of optics, as the first to explain that vision occurs when light bounces on an object and then is directed to one's eyes. Arabic medical studies were dominated by Persian practitioners, notably Avicenna (b. 980), perhaps the single most famous scholar of the House of Wisdom. He wrote a medical encyclopedia called The Canon of Medicine that became the standard textbook of both Islamic and Western training until the mid-17th-century. A polymath, he wrote more than 450 works on astronomy, chemistry, geography, geology, psychology, theology, logic, mathematics, physics and poetry. The greatest Arab philosopher Averroes (b. 1126) played a major role in interpreting the works of Aristotle, popularising and pushing forward Aristotelian rational reasoning; these ideas came to dominate the non-religious thought of the Christian and Muslim worlds. The philosophical theologian Al-Ghazali (b. 1058) provided a merger of Aristotelian reason with Islamic faith, thus playing a similar role to Thomas Aquinas in Christendom almost two centuries later; he was so highly regarded that he was awarded the honorific title "Proof of Islam". The translation of works from Arabic to Latin was of huge importance to Western Europe. The arts and architecture also flourished under the Abbasids. There was no tradition of Muslim theatre, and painting or sculpture were long inhibited by Islam's prohibition on the making of likenesses of the human form. But the story-teller, the poet, the singer, the dancer, and the musician were all highly esteemed; commemorated in European languages with words like "lute" and "guitar". They also produced lovely carpets and exquisite ceramics, but it was in architecture that they truly excelled. The Muslims borrowed Roman technique and Greek ideas of internal space, but what resulted was distinctive. The oldest architectural monument of Islam is the Dome of the Rock built at Jerusalem in 691, a shrine glorifying one of the most sacred places of Jew and Muslim alike; men believed that on the hill-top Abraham had offered up his son Isaac in sacrifice, and that from it Muhammad was taken up into heaven. The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, completed in 715, is probably the greatest of the classical mosques. Its novelty was that it established a design derived from the pattern of worship initiated by the Prophet in his house at Medina; its essential was the Mihrab, an alcove in the wall that indicated the direction of Mecca. Muslim architecture reached its greatest beauty and maturity in Islamic Spain, where the Great Mosque of Cordoba, commenced in 784, is among the most beautiful buildings in the world. Many of the greatest names of the Islamic Golden Age were writing when the political framework of the Muslim world was already in decay. The Abbasids were a ruthless lot who quickly and violently quenched opposition. When they overthrew the Umayyads, a dinner-party was held for the males of the defeated house, supposedly a banquet of reconcilliation; the guests were murdered before the first course. Nevertheless, provincial distinctions remained very real. Governorships tended to become hereditary, and exercised more and more autonomy in appointments and the handling of taxation. Spain had already been lost by 756, where an Umayyad prince, who escaped the fate of his house, proclaimed himself the de facto independent emir of Córdoba; Umayyad Spain (756–1031). Others were to follow. The Abbasid Caliphate had however lost its effective power by 945 to regional Muslim powers. British Isles Following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England of the mid-5th century, the numerous pretty kingdoms gradually coalesce, through the usual processes of warfare, marriage and inheritance. By the 7th-century, the number had been reduced to seven stable realms: four relatively small kingdoms round the southeast coast, Sussex, Kent, Essex, and East Anglia; and three larger kingdoms in a great vertical slices across England, Northumbria in the north, Mercia in the midlands, and Wessex in the south. Unlike the Frankish tradition of divided inheritance, in the Anglo-Saxons custom a single ruler succeeded to the throne; there seems to have been some element of nobles selecting from the royal family rather than strict primogeniture. Throughout the 7th and 8th century power fluctuated between the kingdoms. Kent seems to have dominated in the early-7th-century, but power then shifted northwards to Northumbria. The so-called "Mercian Supremacy" dominated the 8th century, though it was not constant; Offa of Mercia (d. 796) was considered overlord of Britain by Charlemagne. His power is illustrated by the fact that he summoned the resources to build Offa's Dyke, a 150-mile-long earthwork that roughly delineates the border between England and Wales today. Mercia's dominance was brought to an end by the rise of Wessex under King Egbert (802-839); the grandfather of Alfred the Great. He reduced Cornwall to the status of a vassal, and overturned the political order of England by decisively defeating Mercia at the Battle of Ellandun (825), driving the Mercian king into exile. Egbert secured an ill-defined hegemony over all the other six kingdoms, but this position of dominance was short-lived. Egbert's later years saw Mercia reasserted its independence, and the beginning of the escalation of raids by a new group of pagan invaders, the Viking. One of the most interesting and unexplained processes of this era is how England emerged from paganism and backwardness, to one of the leading centres of Christian learning in Western Europe of the 8th-century, producing such notable scholars as the historian the Verenable Bede (d. 735) who among other things helped establish the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ, and Alcuin of York (d. 804) who was a leading figure in the court of Charlemagne. The oldest surviving complete manuscript of the Bible was also produced in England, at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria; the Codex Amiatinus (c. 700). Perhaps it was England's early alignment with the papacy in Rome at the Synod of Whitby (664), that integrated England as an earlier date with a larger continental world; the son of Egbert of Wessex married a daughter of Charlemagne. Perhaps it was friction between the Roman Church and the distinctive practices of the Celtic Church. Or perhaps it was simply the enthusiasm of newcomers to the faith. In comparison with Anglo-Saxon England, the Celtic world of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland remained somewhat undeveloped and semi-barbarous. The fortunes of all the British Isles were to be transformed by the arrival of the Vikings. While the reputation of Vikings is as ferocious pagan marauders, there is little doubt that their arrival was to the long-term benefit of England and Scotland certainly, and to a lessor extend Wales and Ireland as well. Category:Historical Periods